first, he was given colorful food containers, cute sippy cups and cuddly comforters!

from tita chummy and tita anne!

then a few days ago, a magic box arrived filled with almost-everything a newborn little boy would need: socks, onesies, milk bottles, a breast pump, breastfeeding covers and other breastfeeding paraphernalia, newborn formula, receiving blankets, swaddling cloths, a play mat with crinkly elephant ears, a bouncy chair, and a partridge in a pear tree!

going through the box was like being given free rein to explore mary poppins’ bottomless carpetbag — it even had lotion for mommy’s tummy!

thirty weeks of no morning sickness. no sensitivity to any particular smell. no skin dryness. no sleepiness or fatigue.

seven months of no gestational diabetes. no urinary tract infection. no feet swelling. no tomato nose.

then this morning i wake up to blood on tissue paper. bright, bright red on stark white. so sudden and unexpected it shocks me into full wakefulness in half a heartbeat.

for a few seconds i stare at the bloody mess on my hand, unsure, scared to move and not move at the same time. then i call out to my husband, who goes from deep sleep to full awareness at the word blood.

reassuringly, the baby’s heartbeat is strong and he’s as active as ever, kicking and rolling and generally doing whatever kind of calisthenics he regularly does while suspended in amniotic fluid. but for reasons unknown, my external cervix is slightly puckered, which might have been caused by contractions so light i have yet to feel them.

i have been given meds to relax my uterus and stop any and all present and would-be contractions, and ordered by the doctor to stay in bed for at least three days, which gives me an official, medical excuse to have alvin be at my beck and call. maybe i’ll get used to this new, donya lifestyle.

some of you may remember our, um, slightly unsuccessful gardening attempt some time ago. well, now that we live in a space the sun’s rays actually reach, alvin and i decided that it was time for attempt number 2, and that attempt number 2 would be a window sill herb garden.

first, let me make it clear that this is alvin’s herb garden. each day, he goes to the window sill and inspects his row of herbs as soon as he wakes up. he makes sure he waters them before leaving for work and goes straight back to check on the herbs when he arrives home. he mutters darkly about the birds who peck at the leaves and plots revenge against them. i mainly just cheer him on from the bed while sleepily rubbing my eyes.

alvin’s herb garden

the very first herb we got was a lanky dill seedling from one of the plant stalls in mine’s view park, and because it seemed a bit sad to get just one, we also bought a korean pepper seedling along with it, which had pretty, red peppers dangling from its stems.

the weekend after, we went to manila seedling bank along quezon avenue to get proper plant boxes and stock up on more young herb plants. alvin got all excited and researchy and meticulously picked some sweet basil and flat leaf parsley. we left with the new herbs, five clay pots, a sack of potting mix and a gardening trowel.

in the little over two weeks that the herb garden has been in existence, the plants did thrive under alvin’s careful care. the dill, in particular, has grown so much so fast it’s almost scary.

korean pepper, dill (with a new branch that wasn’t there when we bought it), flat leaf parsley, sweet basil

while alvin was at work last saturday morning, i wandered over to the window sill to have a look at how the plants are getting along. to my surprise, there was a tall weed growing right beside the korean pepper plant. it was almost as tall as the plant itself, and given the almost-obsessive attention he’s been showering the plants with, i was surprised that alvin had missed it.

korean pepper and potmate

just in case he was trying out some avant-garde gardening technique he neglected to mention to me, i decided to check with him first before yanking the thing out. i didn’t want to be responsible for the failure of some case study he might be in the middle of, after all. turned out, there wasn’t anything avant-garde or scientific about it.

we decided we were going to paint stripes on our new living room wall, and so we googled diy tutorials, hustled a couple of quarts of free paint (thank you, leftover paint from a project from a year ago!), and spread some old newspapers on the parquet floor. how hard could it be, right? 🙂

painting 101

stripes!

we officially declare you ‘the rustic focal wall’! :p

ta-daa!

other images from our 3-day move.

stuff against walls

i am in love with these curtains.

alvin+jona

being handy, my wonderful husband has learned since, can be really tiring.

alvin and i have been officially trying to get pregnant since march. after getting my period month after month and one false alarm, we were half resigned that it might not happen at all, at least not ‘naturally’.

i’ve been putting off going to see a doctor to have our aging reproductive systems checked out because, well, i’m me and i’m lazy about these things. (don’t follow my example, people.) thankfully, the universe cut me some slack just when i thought there was no escaping getting ‘worked-up’.

we took a home pregnancy test thursday morning, roughly a week after i was supposed to get my period. watching that second purple line grow more and more visible was like helplessly giving my life permission to change forever.

aside from the missed period and a very, very slight queasy feeling at the pit of my stomach though, i felt nothing different. no fatigue, nausea or food aversions that all pregnancy websites said would be there.

i felt so normal that i began to doubt the result of the home pregnancy test. how reliable can a lightweight piece of rectangular hard plastic be, after all?

then i started reading up on being pregnant and all the things that could go wrong and actually hoped the test *was* wrong. how can they call pregnancy wonderful and in the same breath talk about spina bifida, anencephaly, and other possible fetal development problems? seriously.

and here i thought all i needed to brace myself for was the actual birth, which has been giving me nightmares since they made us watch that video during biology class (wide shot of woman giving birth. cut to extreme close up of something abstract and strangely damp. giant thing suddenly barrels out of abstract thing and then you realize that what you were staring at was a f*cking vagina! yes, *that* video. i’m sure you’ve all seen a similar version in school at some point in your lives.).

we finally went to a doctor to have it confirmed and now, i have sheets of thermal paper with black blobs along with a box with two purple lines as proof that i have a little alvinjona swimming inside me.